In those days his recollection was of a little common-place house—a house in a street—with two parlours, one behind the other, kitchens below, bed-rooms above, the most ordinary little house. There was a little garden behind, in which he played; and in which sometimes he was vaguely conscious of being shut out on purpose to play, and doing so in an abortive, unwilling way which took all the pleasure out of it. Sometimes he only sat down and wondered, not even pretending to amuse himself, until a butterfly flew past and roused him, or his little spade showed itself temptingly at hand. At seven one is easily beguiled, whatever weight there may be on one’s spirit. But now and then he would stop and look up at the windows, and see some one moving indoors, and wonder again what it was that the boy was not intended to know.
At this period of John’s career, his father was alive—and he was fond of his father. Sometimes papa would be very late, and would go up to John’s little bed, and bring him down in his night-gown only half awake, seeing the candles like stars through a mist of sleep and wonder, till he was roused to the fullest wakefulness by cakes and sweetmeats, and every kind of dainty which papa had brought. John became quite used to all the varying experiences of this mid-night incident—the reluctance to be roused up, the glory of going downstairs, the delight of the feast. He sat on his father’s knee, with his little bare feet wrapped in a shawl, and his eyes shining as brightly as the candles, munching and chattering. He got quite used to it. He used to feel uncomfortable sometimes in the morning, and heard it said that something was very bad for him, and that the child’s stomach, as well as his morals, would be spoiled. Johnnie knew as little about his stomach as about his morals. And he had a way of being well which greatly interfered with all these prognostications. He was a very sturdy little boy.
He had a consciousness through all these scenes of his mother’s face, very pale, without any smile in it, showing serious, like the moon, among those lights. She gave him no cake or oranges, but it was she who wrapped up his feet in the shawl, and took care of him in the morning when his little head sometimes ached. Papa was never visible in the morning. Johnnie was sometimes a little afraid of him, though he was so jolly in these mid-night visits. The boy was frightened when he was being carried downstairs, and clung very close, though he did not say anything about his fears. Papa would lurch sometimes on those occasions, like the steamboat on which John once had gone to sea. The memory of the lighted table, the father who always made a noise, laughing, talking, sometimes singing, always so fond of his little boy; but mamma dreadfully quiet, scarcely saying anything, and the lights of the candles, not at all like the candles we have now-a-days, but big, and shining like stars, never faded from his memory, even when he had grown a man.
In the day-time, it was rather dull. Susie was five years older than he, going on for twelve, and knowing everything. She got to saying, ‘Go away, child,’ when he asked her to come and play. As he remembered her, she never played, but was always at her needlework or something, almost worse than mamma—and there would be long conversations between those two in the winter’s afternoon, while he was playing at coach and horses, made with chairs, in the other room, the back parlour, which was the place where they had their meals. Sometimes when he got tired of the obstinacy of Dobbin, who was the big mahogany arm-chair, and who would have his own way, and jibbed abominably, he would catch a glimpse through the half-opened folding-doors of those two over the fire. They always spoke very low, and sometimes cried—and, if he came a little near, would give each other a frightened look and say, ‘Not a word before the boy.’ Johnnie’s ears got very quick to those words—he heard them when they were whispered, and sometimes he heard them through his sleep. Could they be talking of anything naughty, or what was it so necessary that he must not know?
There came a time at last when all this confused mystery came to a climax. There were hasty comings and goings, men at the door whose heavy loud knockings filled the house with dismay, stealthy entrances in the dark: for Johnnie a succession of troubled dreams, of figures flitting into his room in the middle of night, but never papa in the old jovial way to carry him down to the parlour with its staring candles. No one thought of such indulgences now. If they were wrong, they were all over. When he awoke he saw, half awake and half dreaming, sometimes his father, though he had been told he was away, sometimes his mother; other strange visitors flitting like ghosts, all confusion and disorder, the night turned into day. He was himself kept in corners in the daylight, or sent into the garden to play, or shut up in the back parlour with his toys. It seemed to Johnnie that they must think he wanted nothing but those toys, and never could understand that to play without any companions, without any wish for playing, was impossible; but he was a dutiful child, and tried to do what he was told. It was at this strange and uncomfortable period that he learned how nice it is to have a book, after you have exhausted all your solitary inventions and played at everything you know. The fascination of the books; however, added to the confusion of everything. Johnnie mixed up Robinson Crusoe with the agitating phantasmagoria of his little life. He thought that perhaps it was from the savages his father was hiding,—for he was sure that it was his father he saw in those visions of the night, though every one said he had gone away. Then there came a lull in the agitation, and silence fell upon the house. Mamma and Susie cried a great deal, and were together more than ever, but Johnnie’s dreams stopped, and he saw no more in the night through his half-closed eyes the flitting figures and moving lights.
Then there came a strange scene very clearly painted upon his memory, though it was not for many years after that he was able to piece it in to his life. Johnnie had been left alone in the house with the maid, the only servant the family had, who was a simple-minded country woman, and kind to the child, though not perhaps in a very judicious way. She was kind in the way of giving him sweetmeats and pieces of cake, and the remains of dainty dishes which upstairs were not supposed to be wholesome for Johnnie, ‘as if the dear child shouldn’t have everything of the best,’ Betty said. On this day Betty was full of excitement, not capable of staying still in one place, she herself told him. She gave him his dinner, which he had to eat all by himself, a singular but not on the whole a disagreeable ceremony, since Betty was about all the time, very anxious that he should eat, and amusing him with stories.
‘Master Johnnie,’ she said, when the meal was over, ‘it do be very dull staying in the house, with nothing at all to do. Missus won’t be back till late at night. I know she can’t, poor dear. It would be more cheerful if you and me went out for a walk.’
‘But how could you leave the house, Betty, all alone by itself?’ said the little boy.
‘It won’t run away, never fear, nor nobody couldn’t steal the tables and chairs; and there ain’t nothing else left to steal, more’s the pity,’ said Betty. ‘We’ll go afore it’s dark, and it’ll cheer us up a bit: for I can’t sit still, not me, more than if I was one of the family: though you don’t know nothing about that, you poor little darlin’, Lord bless you.’
Betty, it is to be feared, would have told him readily enough, but the child was so used to hearing that he must not be told that he asked no questions. To go out, however, was certainly more cheerful than to pass another wintry afternoon in the back parlour without seeing anyone but Betty. He allowed himself to be buttoned up in his little thick blue topcoat of pilot cloth, which made him as broad as he was long, and to have his comforter wound round his neck, though he did not much like that; and then they sailed forth, Betty putting in her pocket the great key of the house door. She did not talk much, being occupied profoundly with interests of her own, of which Johnnie knew nothing, but she led him along past lines of cheerful shops all shining with Christmas presents: for Christmas was coming on, and there was an unusual traffic in the toy shops and the book shops, and all the places where pleasant things for Christmas were. Johnnie stopped and gazed, dragging at her hand, and wondered if any of the picture-books would fall to his share. His mother did not buy many pleasant things for him; but if papa came back he never forgot Johnnie; he thought to himself that surely for Christmas papa would come back—unless indeed the savages had got him. But a certain big policeman strolled by, while this thought passed through the child’s mind, and, even at seven years old, one cannot feel that savages are ineffectual creatures where such policemen are. But the thought of papa gave Johnnie a sense of mystery and alarm, since his father had disappeared in the day-time, only to be seen fitfully through half-shut eyes at night.